In graphic black-and-white letters, “End Racism Now” spans the brick road between 8th and 9th Street in Fort Worth.
Placed right on Main Street leading up to the Fort Worth Convention Center, the 190-foot ground mural is between the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial plaque and the John F. Kennedy Memorial statue.
The mural comes from artist couple Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby, a slew of volunteer painters and project organizer Deborah Peoples. (Peoples may be best known these days as the mother of Fort Worth director Channing Godfrey Peoples, whose debut film, Miss Juneteenth, launched on streaming to critical acclaim and unexpected buzz last month.)
Similar murals have been done in other major Texas cities, such as Dallas and Austin, after worldwide protests started in May following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
After the elder Peoples obtained the permits to start the mural, she looked for local artists to lead the project. Sedrick Huckaby says he and Letitia jumped at the opportunity to help.
Sedrick, a Fort Worth native and associate art professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, and Letitia, a University of North Texas alumna, have shown their own work in galleries across the nation. But Fort Worth is their home, so this project was a labor of love.
Around 250 volunteers signed up to help, according to the Huckabys, and they say far more showed up over the course of last weekend to help paint it. “End” and “Now” are shown as white block letters with the signed names of volunteers in black. The word “Racism” is a stark contrast in black paint. Letitia Huckaby says the idea of that contrast makes sense when we think about the historical context we’re in right now.
“And the different signatures — some people wrote in cursive, some people wrote big, some people wrote in print,” Letitia says. “It speaks to the different personalities and all the walks of life that came out here to get behind this movement.”